Madam, - I read Mary Russell's feature on Rachel Corrie in the Irish Times Magazineof March 8th. On March 18th I was in Jerusalem and by sheer chance I met Rachel's parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie. They are very fine American people indeed.
Rachel believed that both Palestinian and Israeli families had the right to be secure in their homes. On March 16th, 2003 she knew that the Nasrallah family were inside their home as a bulldozer approached it. The bulldozer had already caused a US activist to roll over into barbed wire and had pinned a British activist against a wall. On these occasions the bulldozer had stopped in time, but it did not do so in the case of Rachel Corrie.
As Rachel died, she was held by Alice, a Jewish activist from the UK. I salute all the great Jewish activists who have monitored checkpoints and those who wrote accurate accounts about the occupation.
I believe the terms "promised land" and "chosen people" are no longer operative at our present stage of evolution. What matters now are the values we share with people of goodwill in promoting a brotherhood of man, as we speed on our way to globalisation.
Rachel Corrie's death was a most dramatic and heroic affair. It surpassed the David and Goliath story of Biblical fame. Rachel was a 23-year-old woman with not even a stone or a sling, who was protecting law-abiding victims of a harsh occupation. She set out to tell the world of what she was witnessing, and she ultimately conveyed this message in the form of her body and blood, transcending words in doing so. - Yours, etc,
SÉAMUS V. CLARKE, Old Lucan Road, Chapelizod, Dublin 20.